“TL;DR: in 50 years you’ll see recognizable Orthodox, Catholics and Reformed… and a vast spectrum of Everybody Else, many of them changing in significant ways and seeing that as a virtue.”
Seems to be a safe projection to make.
If Catholics leave because of Homosexual women wanting to be Priests and Clergy not allowed to marry I would call that seperating the harvest from the Chaff.
Spirit filled Bible believing churches (and I do not mean a building)will survive just like they have from the beginning.
Seems like this is an Orthodox perspective. Much is true, but it leaves out much. And he seems ignorant of what’s going on in Baptist circles, both SBC and others.
Yes, Orthodoxy is growing, and a group of dear friends of mine moved there about 30 years ago from a national evangelical ministry. They brought an evangelical perspective into the Orthodox that is still having it’s effect, though with the recent death of Peter Guilquist, an old friend, word is the evangelical influence is diminishing.
What he leaves out is the huge, growing disaffection with old form traditional Christianity - a religion of services, ceremony and outreach works. A troubling “authoritarianism” is growing in many evangelical churches as they see Christians who love God but don’t want to be a part of their membership. Many teach an absolute authority for the local pastor, totally foreign to scripture, and insistence on membership as a means of their control. In the end, this is driving thousands from the organized church. Even while these pastors pound their pulpits in protest and condemnation of same.
The author also leaves out the move of house churches which is growing geometrically. I think he is totally unaware of anything outside denominations. It has it’s share of crazies, but also has a healthy component of wholly committed, strong Christians who emphasize first a close personal relationship with Christ, and second a practical, living means of laying their lives down for one another as it was in the early church. No formal leaders, just Christians loving God and one another - and neighbors - in very real, practical ways. Could be the most real form of Christianity that there is.
BTW, over almost 50 years, I have worked in, alongside, and loved Christians of almost every stripe, color and name both inside denominations and outside of them.....love them all....in each I’ve seen something of Christ the others do not have.....and I can’t wait until our oneness in the body of Christ is a reality.......when we are with Him.....
50 years from now all true Christians will be in heaven with Jesus.
This presumes that things will continue to move in the same direction as they have over the past several decades.
That would seem to be a safe assumption—unless God intervenes with another great revival.
The history of Christianity has, over the centuries, tended to see decay and taking things for granted—until some force intervenes and everything changes.
The Great Awakening is an experience most Americans have heard of—or at least used to have heard of before history ceased to be taught. And there have been many similar awakenings and conversion experiences in the Catholic Church over the years.
And these things can overflow. Methodism not only revived Christianity in England after it had almost died during the eighteenth century, but it overflowed into the Church of England and elsewhere, as well.
Obviously, there is no way to predict such happenings. They happen if and when God wills.
". . . not yet old enough to make a virtue of ancient weirdness the way Eastern Orthodox do."
What "ancient weirdness"?
Sooner rather than later, especially with obamacare's various legal challenges, we will confront both abortion and same sex marriage and biblical teachings.
We've been dancing around the edges, flirting with making holy what is explicitly forbidden, and ignoring the cognitive dissonance that flows freely from such willful blindness.
More than likely, just as with the rebirth of Israel, we will experience some prophetic event or more come to pass that will call more to scripture and revive a more pragmatic, practical approach (aka "fear of God") to religion. We may choose differently at that point. If so, we'll have a chance to see things through to the end.
Otherwise, I think we'll go down the same dark path every other society so afflicted with modernity as ours has become, with churches becoming less relevant as they move farther away from the principles and teachings that define who and what they are.
When it all comes apart, some will call it Judgment.
Fifty years from now, worldwide secularization will be much more dominant than it is now. Worldwide leftists will continue to criticize Christianity and suppress Christianity much worse than they do now. Worldwide Islam will be much more common. Worldwide Christians will be forced to practice their faith in secret.
Straight line extrapolation is likely to break somewhere. Let an end times type persecution scenario break out, and all bets as to how it looks are off.
Orthodoxy: Little visible change, zero substantive change
Because, of course, they never change. I'm being sarcastic. Disaffected evangelicals coming in will bring in evangelical attitudes. Perhaps the Orthoborg can assimilate them, perhaps not.
Catholicism:
Same comments as for the Orthodox.
Reformed Christians:
If not for the current Internet fueled popularity of the "Young, Restless and Reformed" crowd, the author probably wouldn't even be aware of them. The hard core Reformed, those that think that it's about more than "the five points", number a half million or so in N.Am, laboring and worshiping in obscurity. Even adding in the Reformed Baptists wouldn't change that number much.
Lutherans, Episcopagans, Presbyterians, UCC
If there's anything left at all, a shrunken and whithered leftist core, supported by endowments and old money. The gay & the grey don't reproduce well, so where does that leave you? (That's a rhetorical question.)
They'll sell their empty buildings cheap to the Muslims and the charismatics.
Non-charismatic nondenominations
Who knows where they'll end up. Too many different directions. There's the charismawhacky direction. There's the church as mall, church as business megachurch model. Both, I think, end in their own sort of disaster.
I’m not seeing one troubling group — atheists.
The big story of world religion over the next 50 years will be the flourishing of the Christian church in China. Fujian province is supposedly more than 20% Christian today, and growing amazingly fast. The rest of China is following. It is quite possible that China will be majority Christian within my lifetime, or at least my childrens’.
The big story of world religion over the next 50 years will be the flourishing of the Christian church in China. Fujian province is supposedly more than 20% Christian today, and growing amazingly fast. The rest of China is following. It is quite possible that China will be majority Christian within my lifetime, or at least my childrens’.
There isn’t anything new under the sun.
Like it was under Nero and Caligula.
I see ‘mainline’ protestantism surviving only as local, self-selected, alternate communities in an increasingly fractured community. Their theology will be Christian by tradition and spirit, but they will dispense with the Paulian telling of it, for more of an east-west blended packaging of ‘spiritualism’.
This will primarily be in blue states, whereas red states will stick to a more literal traditionalism.
American Christianity will continue to liberalize and be assaulted by off shoot cults as the message and mission of Jesus gets further corrupted for political and personal gain...
The hardcore atheists will be demanding we all be thrown to the lions right away, while the PETA adherents will be insisting a more moderated, rationed approach to prevent the lions from becoming obese.